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In the last issue of www.cranked.cc I lamented the temporary loss of cycling to injury. The displacement of a weekly ritual with nothing to fill the gap. Conflating that with a world where riding mountain bikes is a thing you talk about not the thing you do. Missed the fucking point as usual.

The point being it’s not the virtual road to nowhere that’s the issue here. The gap isn’t between self-pity and an uncertain future. It’s how far you’ve slid down the mountain from the summit of reasonable fitness.

No amount of time on a turbo trainer is going to mitigate that. Well it might for someone without a diary launching that individual to all four corners of the UK- elbows deep in whatever they’re serving with beer in another anonymous hotel.

So that’s me then, but the first ride back was gloriously muddy and endlessly fantastic. Tiring but life affirming. The second went a little further in conditions somehow even worse leaving me struggling on the last couple of climbs. A week later we rode out and that 60km broke me in ways I don’t remember.

Then came the snow and other excuses to put the fitness recovery on hold until a trip last weekend to Coed-Y-Brenin. The first – and I’m putting it out there – the best of the UK trail centres. We left behind the slop and misery of the forest to ride grippy trails at silly speeds.

Up to around two thirds of the way round anyway. When even the drug of rocky singletrack triggering the release of endorphins couldn’t hide tired muscles and gasping lungs trying to keep up.

Up being most of the problem. Sure many other body parts had the complaints line on speed-dial, but the legs and lungs which normally hoist me up any grade at a respectably brisk pace flipped into a state of extreme sulkiness, leaving me with nothing other than a ‘limp home’ mode.

Most of my riding mates reckon I’m reasonably fit. I’m a bit humble bragging about it, but secretly it’s a matter of some pride. Sure others may be faster when the gradient turns negative, but give me this climb at least. I never really considered it any kind of skill until I lost it.

Desperate times dear reader. Clearly I’m not going to get any faster downhill, but riding uphill isn’t really that hard. Hard-earned maybe but nothing that a serial hit on the lumpy geography of home trails won’t provide. Trails which will soon deliver on Springs’ bounty – loamy, fast and occasionally dusty.

Trails which trace perfect turns through a field of bluebells. Beckoning you on for one more climb to lay down another layer of singletrack memory. Digital happy place for the taking. Not a place for the infirm or unfit. Right here and now tho, they’re shit. Tractionless tyre-filling monsters ready to violently transport the uncommitted from a stable position atop the bike to a somewhat less comfortable countenance slammed into the ground. Or a tree.

Which is where I found myself twenty minutes into my first night ride for five months. Shunned the wheeled dark back in October for solid excuses based around training for a half marathon. That silliness is how we ended up here in a mildly ironic circular route.

Conditions – in my view – were horrible. Not properly muddy where a good tyre might bite, but nowhere near dry. The median between those two states is ‘slick’. This first trail had been built during my enforced absence and it was a mystery of tight steep switchbacks bisecting the fall line.

Made the first two, crashed on the next three. Walked for a bit having trapped my still poorly ankle between pedal and stump. Well limped really. Found everyone else mostly dab free and remarking on how well the trails were holding up after all this rain. I hope the dark hid my disappointment on why I was the only one not finding it easy.

And aside from one climb when gritted teeth and bloody-mindedness put me close to the front, most were viewed from the opposite end of the group. Some of my best friends had clearly received both fitness cheats and bike handling skills for Christmas. The bastards.

It got better. It had too really. Long learned skills gently edged out full braked terror. It wasn’t fast but it stopped being quite so crash-y. I was counting the climbs in a way I never used to, until we crested the final lump leaving us high above Ross and a couple of trails from beer.

One of which has a decent sized gap jump on it. Ridden it many times. Didn’t ride it last time out, before I monged myself, when it was slick like tonight. Not making that a habit. My plan to follow everyone off it didn’t survive first impact with reality as they rode away from me as had been the form the entire evening.

Right then. Stop. Have a little word with yourself. Internal debate on not being bloody lame. External validation with a single ‘fuck it’. Three seconds later it’s over and it was the anti-climax I’d promised myself it would be. Still felt bloody good to get it done tho.

The pub, the craic, the being something others my age are not – that all stands and I’ve missed it. Being crap in the dark and the mud I’ve pretty much accepted. Being shit uphill I will not. I need to be as good or better than I was before.

The ride back to that is going to be long, and occasionally painful. So same time next week then?

300 yards east of that image location is the main road. Which must mean this is our lane, which rises gently from the house on the standard Herefordshire gauge predicated by the pervasive road-narrowing scheme.

It might as well be on the moon. Similar ambitious forays into orbital mechanics would be required to transport any vehicle from here to there**. Switch the view 180 degrees and it’s hardly any kind of improvement.

Our house nestles in a shallow bowl at river altitude with three exits to – however close Ross approximates to – civilisation. The one right there, a farm track masquerading as an official thoroughfare climbing fifty metres in less than a mile, or a final conduit to something deserving of road marking which is even steeper.

After 36 hours of snow driven on by relentless winds, we emerged to beautiful cornices sculptured by nature and an acceptance that snow ploughs happen only to tax payers not marooned in a tiny hamlet.

This is why I bought a 4×4 when we moved here. It’s still not entirely clear to me why I sold it. A replacement of sorts lies behind the door to the shedofdreams(tm), itself garrisoned by drifting snow requiring much grumpy shovelling to breach.

Provision wise things were looking promising; human fuel, heating fuel, backup heating fuel in the form of seasoned logs, and a fridge full of beer for emergencies and breakfast.

Physically tho we were pretty much stuck. Working internet though reached out beyond these four walls and told of the standard hyperbole and stupidity triggered by the first #snowmageddon hashtag.

You know the sort of thing, revving cars going first backwards, then sideways then into some innocent parked car. Ecstatic sledge based kids being hauled up wintry slopes by ’snow-day’ parents . Cats being repurposed for the new winter sport of ‘Feline Curling’, and sad snowmen being the recipient of the carrot the salad bowl forgot.

Important stuff no doubt. But locally a far more serous problem presented itself. We’d run out of wine. Let me qualify that, I’d run out of wine – Carol barely drinks anything, on the grounds I’ve already exhausted most of her allowance, but occasionally fortifies herself with a 70s parody snowball. She has sufficient ingredients to last sometime into the next millennium, whereas I was bereft through what must be called out as piss poor planning.

Bike it is then. Sold the fatbike. See previous remark re: 4×4. Still we’re nothing if not chubby in 2018, so Jessie’s*** bike was pulled from the rack along with clothing previously campaigned on freezing winter commutes.

Things started well. Fab to be out on a bike. Passing tractors created grippy wheel ruts, so we headed up the steepest hill on the simple grounds it wasn’t the main road. Yeah that was apparently clear, but where’s the fun in that?

Fun soon turned to slog as the snow deepened to the point where even farm machinery cannot go. Brilliant I thought, just me and the snow, no one else has been up here, how cool is that?

Pretty bloody cool when you’re up to your armpits in it with the bike over your head.

A selfie in those circumstances would likely have left me incapacitated in a location where the aforementioned moonshot represents the most practical rescue mission, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

Along with the masterclass of grip management heading down the other side. Past the Cider mill when even I can gird a road bike’s loins beyond 55kph. The steepness combined with freeze/thaw tractor ruts had the tyres keen to investigate the left and right margins of the road. Mostly at the same time.

It was mostly slips’n’giggles narrowly avoiding taking out upstanding members of the local community armed with snow shovels, and increasingly, terrified expressions as a tail sliding bandana wielding idiot sashayed by with a cheery ‘I’d stop and say hello if I could but.. oooooh fuck hedge, arrrrggghhh, saved it’

Doing my bit for neighbourly relations, I sympathised with those who’d trudged across the arctic wastes in search of a loaf of bead. Their search was to prove fruitless, whereas my transactions in the village shop were more of the clink-y and chocolate-y sort.

Appropriately provisioned, I considered my navigational options. Back over the hill with evens odds of smashing bottles during intersects of steep and icy, or a 2 mile yomp on the main road with only a 25% chance of being wiped out by ‘Mr I’ve got a 4×4 so 90 MPH is absolutely fine’.

I chose wisely. Whummed down the main road on 12 PSI tyres and a bag full of moist grapes. Arrived home to find the local farmer had lobbed about 10 tons of deep lying snow into a field he didn’t own. Well that’s the pub conversation sorted for the next six months anyway.

Whereas tomorrow I’ll be aping the big mechanical scoop with some one person-power shovelling. Much as I loved riding my bike today, Swindon is probably a bit too much of an ask on Monday morning 😉

*I spent bloody ages thinking that up. If you’re not a student of the Fast and Furious franchise, that’s hardly my fault is it? I might start these blogs with a list of pre-reading 😉

**especially if you’re the embarrassed owner of a real wheel drive car shod with ditch-finder tyres and an automatic gearbox.

***She’s ridden it twice. It’s definitely hers. I’ve merely tested it for safety on the other 24 rides.

Well I didn’t die. In other news my ankle failed to explode nor swell to the size of the ‘Tomato most likely to win an award for the most amusingly shaped vegetable‘. Bikes were ridden, beer was drunk, lies were told. The latter specifically when being quizzed on my homage to a man recently introduced to a second leg.

Happily telling fibs to my family is ideal preparation for fabricating huge whoppers to the physio, who understandably takes a dim view to a refusal to subordinate my need to ride against 200 years of medical precedence. Which explains why my opening gambit of ‘that’s why it called practising medicine eh?‘ is met with stony silence and a weary shake of the head.

I don’t know better of course. What I do know is how much riding defines me, and how looking into the abyss of ever stopping makes me more than scared. I’m also well attuned to what a healing body feels like – having smashed it up so many times. Good enough is good enough and slinging Camelbaks over shoulders, while we’re loading the van, is nothing more than normalised behaviour.

Riding though is something different. Lock four mountain bikers in a pub and refuse to release them until they’ve created a single definition of mud and you’ll be waiting a while*. What we do agree on tho is the epitome of mud bastardness is ‘soft over hard‘. A slurry of matt black sliding viscously over firmer sub soil in some kind of Fibonacci sequence.

Throw a tyre at that and you’re spinning the wheel of possible outcomes. Might got left, could go right, definitely won’t be going forward, fair to even chance of having a lie down to consider your options.

Generally these conditions do not suit my riding style. Who am I kidding? These conditions leave me way adrift of the pack wondering when Spring might turn up. Not last week and not yesterday either. It’s the hope that kills you. Not much rain this week, there are buds in the trees and dry patches on the ground. Today should be so much better.

It was quite a lot worse. I’m still okay with that against a baseline of not riding at all but after 36km I was mostly ruined. My ankle was what I’m thinking now as standard. It hurts a bit but not much more than normal. The rest of me was properly broken; lower back, neck, arms and legs too long distanced from hours of hard physical exercise.

We’d run out of food but being stubborn to the power of stupid carried on regardless, climbing on slick paths then attempting to navigate leafless trees where amazing tyres met their seasonal match. Second time out though my worry about smashing my ankle up faded a little into the background meaning progress was upgraded from glacial to stately.

The singletrack was mostly shit but the experience was fantastic. The sun shone, the bullshit flowed, the temperature kept the shivers away. There were no crashes but there was beer to toast our uninjuredness. And at the end of it all, I chucked a dirty bike in the shed and risked ruining the washing machine with muddy kit.

That’s a ritual that gets boring in winter but yesterday it just made me smile. A detoxification process if you like; an anti-arsehole activity, a mud flung sense of perspective that there was this, and there was all the other stuff I needed to show I cared about. Rather than assuming just being there was quite the same thing.

Knowing you’re going to miss riding is less introspection and more basic self-awareness. Working out how it’s the metronome of a larger life is probably more important. Without one, I’m not very good at the other. It’s at least half the reason I’m sat in yet another hotel room drinking water not beer.

Spring is coming. My favourite season. One of rebirth. Never gets old however many times I marvel at nature regenerating in all sorts of amazing ways. Since I’m hardly a spring perennial, it’s time to prepare myself for another season of riding mountain bikes.

There’s stuff I can do nothing about. Entropy is a relentless bastard. What’s in my control right now is making sure I’m as ready as I can be. For eight weeks that choice was taken away from me.

It’s done me some good. Forced me to stop and heal. Given me time to think. To work out if this is still my thing. To decide how much I’m prepared to suffer to be as good as I can be. Thinking time is over though.

It’s time to ride. Three sweet words.

*two reasons. 1-they’ll never agree and the best you can hope for is about eight separate versions of the same thing and 2-it’s a pub. That’s pretty much our spiritual home.

Searching for inspiration in yet another hotel bar, I started counting. Not the days I’d been away from home. Or the might-as-well-be-infinity items unticked from my to-do list. Or even how many beers had brought on this latest muse.

No in an attempt to cheer myself up, electronic calendars were brought into sharp relief to calculate how long it had been since I’d ridden a bike. That’s a definition which is inclusive of ‘outside‘ and ‘dirt‘ and dismissive of sweating out a winters coat of misery on the virtual road of nowhere*

37 days. Fuck me that’s a lifetime. Especially for a man accelerating over the horizon of more than half of his. No time to waste then unless one considered the wider nuances of not rushing the ‘frankenankle‘ back into the fray when it’d barely quietened from ‘bloody painful’ to ‘mostly annoying‘

I’ve already had a proper telling off from a medical professional who felt her diagnosis of eight weeks was probably a little better informed than my ‘yeah it’s been a week, I’ve done loads and it bloody hurts now‘. She has a valid point. I have a less quantifiable one. If I don’t ride soon, there may be wider consequences. Elastic waistbands, hair-trigger irritation and a level of grumpiness entirely unfair for those unfortunates in my immediate orbit.

Fast forward to tonight and we’re at 43 days and I’ve self diagnosed myself as ‘not entirely broken‘. My last ride was a muddy horror on the 2nd of Jan which gets better the further away from it I get. Three days after that I subjected my ankle to the kind of trauma that’d have the less lucky encased in plaster. Tomorrow tho I’ll ride my mountain bike

More than ten years ago I shredded my knee in a non amusing fashion and it was five long weeks before risking it on the dirt. After which the fear of a repeat nearly put an end to the whole endeavour. A couple of years after that, I kind of lost the plot and took a whole month off.

Never 43 days though. I’ve grown fat on nebulous willpower and unfit despite regular visits to the realm of the statically deluded. Sit ups in hotel rooms followed by chips and beer at the bar are not the recommended preparation for getting back out there.

So I’ve some idea where my MTB fitness and legs have gone. I have surmised they may be hiding in my stomach. I expect tomorrow will be physically demanding and mentally challenging. Being slow up hill is a given and hanging out the back on the descents is more than likely. What’s less likely is whether anyone will notice the difference.

Other than me. And I’m unlikely to care much because I’ll be riding a bike with my mates with dirt under my wheels. Okay it’ll be dirt mostly disguised by moisture, and any skills to deal with such things will be mostly forgotten.

That’s okay. Just re-aquainting myself with the bikes was a cause for joy. A bit of pointless fettling, a refitting of winter mudguards, a tightening of bolts and the pressurisation of tyres felt very much like coming home. Returning to the tribe, reframing what a weekend should feel like, remembering why this hobby / borderline insanity has pretty much consumed me for nearly twenty years.

Chronologically that’s less troubling that 43 days. I don’t know how may I have left, but I’ll be buggered if I’m going to waste even one more wondering what a healed ankle feels like. Might pass with flying colours, might knock it back a few weeks.

That’s mountain biking tho. Risk versus reward every second you’re living in that world. No point dying wondering.

Wish me luck, I’m going back in.

*a quest described in the rather fine Cranked magazine. The latest edition is available at www.cranked.cc

I’m living in a world of nots. Not being able to ride a bike outside. Not spending enough nights at home. Not matching a lack of exercise with a lack of beer. Not living outside the bubble of normality.

There are consequences. Some physical – even after swerving hotel fried everything, sugary snacks to extend working days, and meals for one where food and alcohol are mostly interchangeable – depositing me in an unhappy place some 2kg north of a first 2018 weigh in.

Mentally tho, that’s even a bit tougher. For many years hotel rooms represented what I did in the week, zeroed in on where the work was, a proxy for a home life barely missed. Now while the stuff people pay for is far more interesting, the logistics kind of piss me off.

Which made breaching this county boundary at 4 o’clock a righteous thing. After some desultory attempts to suppress a burgeoning inbox, the pub black-holed me into Ross where the blokes I used to ride with were assembled at a bar over which I was keen to transact significant business.

We talked bikes of course. In the cannon of the agrarian year, February exploits the mantra that it is ‘the hope that kills you‘ when longer days are drowned in rain leaving mountain biking to sink into the mud where the kindred spirits lie. Normally this is good cause for a proper whinge, but right now I’d bolt the FrankenAnkle to a pedal and make like a dirty paddle steamer.

But that’s not the point here. While we made plans for monster road trips targeting far flung destinations, one of the crew spoke of his – well there’s no other way to codify this – fetish for bicycles made for two. An inclusive engineering solution to share his love of cycling with his spouse. That’s a someone for whom her shiny mountain bike in the shed was more about him than her.

Steady on. Wooah, back off a second here. This is a dangerous idea espousing sharing might be a good thing. Swapping the disinterest of partners subjected to an unstructured ramble of ‘you should have seen that, you should have been there‘ with actually seeing that and being there. That’s the language of treachery.

Riding is our time. It’s the glue which holds us together. Sure we’d be friends I’m sure still talking shit but feeding beer bellies not dreams. We’re so un-clubby it’s painful- at best maybe a loose association of intersecting ideals. A meritocracy of those fighting the good fight against the dying of the light. A coven of not giving up. But we’ll be there on any Sunday. In every season. Against every excuse not to be.

I’m not sure there’s room for compromise. To dilute the solution of the selfish. To exchange a walk on part in a war for a bit part in a cage*. To actively choose road over dirt, to trade miles for mates, to slide into something that might be more of our age.

There’s a irony that in a world of winter monochrome, this is far less black and white than a cursory analysis would suggest. Our world is not a simple choice between blokes doing the mountain bike thing, and those who’d like to bring the not chronically obsessed into the fold.

There’s room for both of course. Before I mangled my ankle, we passed what I’d always labelled the tandem of misery on our way home, from a ride mostly remembered for shaking off a ton of mud before being allowed back into the car.

It’d been shitting it down. The land around was clamped in grey and dead in every direction. The whole world felt like it was going onto suicide watch because winter was going to last for ever. Yet these two – apparently sane – individuals were grinning and loving it in a way we really hadn’t been.

Pub they said. Sure we replied. In which stories were told to the power of two. Riding squared if you will. Good times for sure but not for me. A week later I’m riding a static bike in a sweaty shed to displace the anxiety that this might be the fun stopping injury. Suddenly I wasn’t quite so sure if something different wasn’t still something.

It’s all riding bikes. It’s physicalising a belief than outside is better than inside. It’s extending the community of those who feel the same way. It’s finding a way to square circles by turning them with those who otherwise would be left wondering what they might be missing.

So tonight, it was great to see my mates. It threw dirt into the hole of not riding. It made me remember why bikes and trails are not the full story. Also gave me pause wondering if I’d done enough to share the things which I assumed no one else in the family understood.

There’s a certain cadence spinning the truth at this time of year. The pretence that being outside is something to be cherished. The belief that schlepping through endless mud shall somehow defibrillate the flatline of Spring. The conceit that riding through the endless shit of winter somehow elevates you over those stuck to the sofa through apathy to the power of Pringles.

That’s my world from 2002 through 2017. Every year upped the bar of commitment as proper cold winters gave way to an indeterminable period of grey dankness shrouded in rain. Avoiding the damp squelch of soft limb on rain battered tree was nothing more than a happy non-accident.

Then after a couple of hours of something that feels like therapy shared with like minded souls, tedium demands another thirty minutes of harvesting the bike from its mud mould. And that’s before being washing machine denied prior to an apparently infinite manual rinse cycle of clothes made three times heavier by their carriage of forestry operations.

Well I’m missing it. It’s been a month since I last rode* a mountain bike and it’s at least another of the same before mental requirement meets physical reality. There’s a certain irony that this excuse to wimp out is the best I’ve ever had, when all I want to do is go out and get properly filthy.

I’m not eulogising it; clearly it’s going to be bloody horrible out there, with a negligible amount of fun wrapped around a few hours of misery. After which there will be the pub. Before which there will be a shared experience, a recognition of group stupidity, a laugh at what other people might be doing with their Sunday.

This is what I’m doing. I’m sat in front of this screen facing off to my other life. The one which pays the bills but isn’t exactly inspiring. Don’t get me wrong, having absorbed an internet thread on the horrors of shift working when you’re middle aged, it’s clear I’m still living it easy here. So there’s stuff to do and I will do it while rain batters the window, knowing the only outlet is an hour on a static bike in the shed-of-misery.

That and giving my ankle the Paddington stare while wondering at high volume ‘when are you going to get better you bastard, it’s not like you’ve suffered any abuse. Well not until I ruined you, but it’s time to move on‘. It’s not moved on much still requiring Nurafen balms and the ministrations of my long suffering physio who tells me a) it’ll get better in a few more weeks and b) you’re not 18 and in Kansas anymore.

So this is what I’m left with. Sweating in a cold shed and walking the dogs. The stupid young one** acting as a depth indicator in a lake that was once fields. That time being yesterday before the rain decided 24 hours was an entirely appropriate duration to flood the local geography.

At some point I’ll be able to ride a mountain bike again. Whatever the prevailing weather and trail conditions, at least one of my extensive shed based collection shall intersect with the grim outside my door. Until then I’m left with the buggeration of the observer, the chagrin of the not included, the desperation of the hanger on.

Here’s the thing- when you wonder if it’s worth going out in the grim. If you’ll get anything other than a winters crack, back and rucksack of moist mud, if the ball-ache of dealing with the aftermath of winter is worth it, remember this:

You have a choice, Trust me, that’s a good thing. I’m beyond envious.

*more carried across the Brecon Beacons. I’d pay lots of cash right now to do that again.

**the old one is just as stupid. He just doesn’t like getting his feet wet.

Way back in 2004 I contracted a fatal lung disease*. Other than some rather scary chest x-rays and a valiant attempt to break the world record for phlegm output, the major side effect was six weeks of shed based misery.

Outside messed up my insides. The intersection of cold air and asthma scarred lungs triggered chest heaving coughs, chronic shortness of breath and the aforementioned phlegm deposits. I retired hurt to the garden where my unused cross bike** was shackled to the modern day torture marketed as a mechanical turbo trainer.

Which swapped noise for forward motion while you sweated the majority of your body weight attempting to match the efforts of a grainy ‘sufferfest‘ video. Not some kind of porn movie, except unless your tastes tended to specialist publications offering lycra, pain and men trying very hard not to be messily sick.

Those videos – and yes they were bought for real money on those new fangled compact discs – had production values slightly below the shittiest ever aerobics video. After a month you knew every exercise so, if breath allowed, responding to the trainer enquiring if you were feeling the burn with a cheery ‘go fuck yourself‘.

I felt the burn alright. Felt the urge to set the whole bloody shed on fire. At least it’d all be over without the impossibly enthusiastic host patronising me one last time with ‘step it up, remember no pain means no gain’.

Roll forward nearly fifteen years and here we are again. The FrankenAnkle is at least six weeks away from interacting with a proper bicycle. With my lackadaisical attitude to healthy eating, the emergency services will be winching my 300lb corpulent carcass out of the house, unless some form of exercise can be crowbarred into a 45 day cheese’n’port marathon.

The world has moved on. Virtual cycling worlds are peopled by second-life dropouts sporting the latest in smart trainers. Bluetooth, wireless and – I’m guessing – dark sorcery connect the three together through the simple expedient of splashing cash on self assembly*** plastics containing electro magnets and a subscription to what I’ve come to think of as ‘Ego by Roadie’

After an initial – and frankly confusing – toe dip into the world of watts, cadence and internet testosterone, I joined a group ride through the medium of social media and abandonment of common dignity. The start line was awash with pixelated road riders differentiated by frames, wheels, haircuts, socks and glasses. It was a bit creepy to be honest especially once the 1984-esque instructions were splashed across my screen.

None of which I understood mainly because they talked about pace, beacons, packs and drafting – all concepts in which I cherish my ignorance. And a little bit due to the distraction of coercing the varied communication signals into a tiny receiver. So the start caught me by surprise, as two hundred electronic souls barged me from the rear responding to the bark of ‘2.4 W/KG for the warm up‘

Right whatever. Sounds painful. It was as well attempting to breach that gap to the back of the pack. My pleasure at not being quite last was cut short by a total confusion of what to do next. My drafting skills were precisely zero. Since that day I’ve upgraded them to bloody useless.

Key issue is the communication lag between what you see on the screen and what’s happening in the real world. The feedback is clever; hills make you work harder, drafting easier, pedal harder to move through the pack, coast and go backwards. Works brilliantly if you can synchronise the five second gap between the two.

Took me a while – oh let’s be generous and call it an hour – to fully comprehend that. In those sixty minutes, my desperation not to be dropped would see me burst out in front of the group, only to be spat right out the back as I panicked and forgot to pedal. Once when I saw the road ahead populated by only a single rider, my attempts to chase him down were dashed.

The harder I tried, the faster he went. Eventually it dawned on me that some desperate prodding of the keyboard had changed the camera angle and I was, in fact, chasing myself. Things didn’t really improve from there.

I really, REALLY, want to be properly snooty about those who take actual pleasure from this shed based purgatory. It’s mental – attempting to beat people you’ve never met. Like Strava with moving pictures. It’s a long run from fun and a decent bike ride from compelling.

Except in the five days since cautiously poking my nose into this virtual world, I’ve ‘ridden‘ 125km, gone stats-geek native and -it pains me greatly to say this-actually passed an hour in a group ride without feeling the urge to smash the whole thing up with a hammer.

Once the ankle is cleared for proper riding though, the setup will atrophy as befits a pale imitation of the real thing. In the meantime tho, come tomorrow, Bob5499 is toast.

If you’ve go this far, you might enjoy a more coherent article on injury, indoor trainers and the injustices of both in the next Cranked Magazine due out early Feb.

*on reflection, it wasn’t quite as serious as my initial diagnosis. Goes to prove the medical professionals, friends and family were rather more accurate with their identification of ‘hypochondria‘

**Bought two more since. Same result. Which makes me either stubborn or stupid. It’s stupid isn’t it?

***self assembly yes. Intuitive no. Without Carol I’m pretty sure the only exercise I’d have managed would have been gleefully taking a fire axe to the thing.

There are a collection of noises you wish remained silent. Clustered around aural stimuli triggering involuntary gasps, cries of pain and classic anglo Saxon verbiage rhythmically assembled around the extensive use of the word ‘fuck‘.

Instant awakening to a night creak on the stair, dread comprehension of a car/immovable scenery interface and the sound of ligaments tearing themselves from their biomechanical norms.

What a noise that is. Somewhere between the creaking of a Man-of-War tortured under full sail and the snap of a door slamming. Other senses tumble in; the sharp flash of pain, the smell of the earth rising towards your stumbling frame, the view of the world going sideways.

It’s gone sideways alright. In more ways than one. And while this extends barely past a second of misjudgement, the story starts some ten days before. A happier time when an uninjured Al ran 15 kilometres at a pace that’d easily meet the goal of a sub two hour half marathon. After which the whole ridiculous enterprise, of a fifty year old man pretending there were still athletic achievements worth striving for, could be firmly shut down and never spoken of again.

Riding bikes – people who fail the risk/reward test say – must be dangerous. Well yes and no. Yes because the chance of physics and geography coming together in a bone crushing manner tends to the probable, but no as that’s mitigated by the experience of twenty years gaining adequate skill to avoid doing so.

Running though is essentially Russian roulette with no empty chambers. Metabolising diesel fumes in the traffic offers a similar level of serious injury as lying in front of it may provide. There’s a one to one correlation between my last two runs and the number of limbs seriously compromised.

Firstly that 15km had consequences; the visible one being a pathetic limp when my left knee took umbrage at ground pounding, so striking out in a slightly different direction to the rest of the leg. I’m not a medical man but I’ll do my best to describe it. Scrape-y – each step sanding a little off the wonky bit of my patella.

A weeks recuperation based entirely on a Christmas cheese and wine diet failed to ease the abrasion, so my long suffering physio was called in to deal with this latest incident of hypochondria. The summary of that diagnosis was ‘being old but not wise enough to stretch properly‘ and a caveated green light to go and try again.

Rather than risk a further ninety minutes of asphalt percussion, I collected my proper running mate Ian and his ridiculously rapid tiny mutt in an eight legged assault of the lower slopes of Penyard woods. Woods that have been the subject of brutal logging leaving a barren landscape of ankle deep mud and fallen trees.

The latter represented my nemesis. The former merely pissed me off for the 40 minutes or so of us making slow progress* on flooded trails abruptly terminated by felled trees and trench like double track. We headed away from the arboreal carnage choosing instead some choice singletrack laced with happy two wheeled memories.

Not anymore. Now when I think of this trail it contracts my inside as synapses zap dendrites taking me right back there and THAT noise. The one following a stumble over a fallen log, a desperate attempt to stabilise a falling body, a moment of disentoriation as my head torch illuminated first the ground and then the stars, followed inevitably with my entire weight rolling my right ankle to ninety degrees.

I wasn’t going to run this off. But I had to try as the option was to give up, limp to the road and wait for Ian to fetch me back. He’d have been fine with it, I really wasn’t and the bloody dog was giving me the eye. So we jogged gently home, I grabbed a bag of ice and a box of Ibuprofen and some internet self diagnosis.

Really not required. When your frankenankle(tm) is the size of a grapefruit and you can barely get a sock over it, it’s probably reasonably to assume bad things have happened. Not quite sure what. The full horror will be revealed when my on-speedial-physio can do a proper evaluation once the swelling subsides.

Until then the best case scenario suggests 2-4 weeks. The worse case one… well let’s not go there as that suggests riding bikes in Spring might be happening to other people.

What it definitely means is no half marathon for me next week. I’m genuinely pissed off because a) I was on course to be on the course for less than 2 hours and b) I’ll have to carry on bloody risking injury to run the same race sometime in April.

I could just give up. It’s not like I don’t have form here. Not going to happen. For a few moments in the last two months I’ve genuinely enjoyed making progress by foot. And I’ll be buggered if all the horrible bits interspersing those flashes of a runners high won’t count for something.

Whatever. That’s for later. Right now I’m reflecting on what a stupid bloody idea it was to give up drinking this month.

*that’s pretty much my running pace. Ian could easily lap me at least once but is far too good a mate to even suggest it. His bloody dog looks keen tho.

Tradition is an odd concept when you think about it. It decomposes into repeating the same things yet somehow expecting a different outcome. Which is a rather better definition for insanity.

Examples abound; this is the year we pack unstable family relationships into a tight box, ignite the blue touch paper with alcohol and by some miracle nothing shall explode*. Further there is no possibility I shall emerge from these ten days more than 1 kg heavier despite eating my own body weight in cheese washed down with tasty toxins. Finally the fragile purity of my resolutions shall not shatter under the weight of dark, frozen January misery.

That’s pretty much covered off the joy of Christmas so let’s move onto some real food for the soul** The therapy/drinking group cleverly disguised as a loose association of mountain bike riders mark the holidays with a ride up and over a Welsh mountain. While the route and the date never change, who actually turns up is a little more random based on availability, prevailing weather conditions, level of apathy and – in the case of one particular chap – the ability to function whilst under the spell of a crippling hangover.

We’ve been here before. Tradition dictates we shall go there again. It’s like bloody groundhog day with less amusing marsupial and more stumbling idiot. Learning at least a little from last years debacle, my bag was fully packed and triple checked a whole day before. Ensuring my performance – while still wholly pitiful – would not be degraded due to a lack of the proper equipment.

Aside from my body. Which has the misfortune to host my brain. An organ that cannot look at a six bottle wine rack without considering it some kind of personal challenge. Although first it needs to warm up with a couple of beers, and some kind of donkey stunning cocktail, before a one man bacchanalian assault on all things liquid grape.

Not quite one man. Matt and Lauren kept me company, but only I was able to entertain everyone in the room with a repeated stumble over an obviously placed obstacle when making room for more poison became a biological necessity.

As the world swam out of focus, some malicious bastard added gin to it. In quantities that would have transitioned that donkey from stunned to dead. Through years of rigorous practical study, I avoided any such fate instead retiring to bed at around 7pm, once I’d established which flight of stairs might be the real one.

The next morning we went riding. It was epic. A proper death march. Which considering I couldn’t operate a tooth brush at 7am is something I’m somewhat surprised I physically survived. Mentally though I’m a little tougher than I pretend so neshing out was never a remote possibility, although being violently ill in the van was my constant companion as we ascended into increasingly snowy landscapes.

Days like these aren’t about the riding. They are about the memories. The healing process kick-started by my three compatriots incessantly ripping the piss. Then staring at the glass-still reservoir under white-dusted hills on the first climb. Noting the increasing snow depth as we climbed higher. Playing the game of riding on partially solid ice without crashing through.

And then onward through metre high snow drifts where bikes were going to be nothing more than an annoying accessory. Until they weren’t which is pretty much when the crashing started. A 15 minute moorland yomp was transformed into a nearly an hour and a half of pathfinding, falling over in the snow, permanent laughing and wondering when it might be going dark.

The conditions didn’t improve much. They changed from deep snow to sloppy chop to hard ice. Our response was the same- ride what you can, walk the rest. Concluding in arse-sliding down the descent from the gap desperately hanging onto difficultly shaped bicycles. Even when remounting became an option, it was still mildly hairy. Especially if you were still mostly drunk.

By the time we hit the road – still with nearly 10km to go – the frozen four were suffering from ice-block feet and finger numbness. Which made the last 30 minutes chain ganging the canal path fairly unpleasant. Mainly as the path was more water than anything else so firing barely liquid moisture at sodden shoes.

What else do I remember? The aforementioned slide down a steep trail being made just a little more exciting when Haydn and – more worryingly – Hadyn’s spiky bike just failing to remove one of my vital organs. I called an impromptu meeting of the death march committee to declare it a solid 8, with a consideration for a further half point if anyone actually contacted frostbite.

No one did. I know this for sure as the four of us joined another twenty for food later. An event where drink was also served – even to a man who had made the rash statement. some twelve hours earlier, that he had given it up for life.